People Are Roasting Vanity Fair Over Its Margot Robbie Cover Story

After a breakout turn in The Wolf Of Wall Street, Margot Robbie has been a star on the rise. The talented actress is one to watch this summer, starring in two high profile blockbusters, The Legend Of Tarzan and Suicide Squad. To promote these two roles, Robbie was the August cover girl for Vanity Fair, with Vinyl co-creator and frequent VF contributor Rich Cohen conducting the interview. Unfortunately, things got off-track almost immediately. Cohen seemed to be hung up on Robbie’s (considerable) physical attributes, and decided to convey his awe-struck horniness in an unrelentingly skeevy way. Consider his lede:

America is so far gone, we have to go to Australia to find a girl next door. In case you’ve missed it, her name is Margot Robbie. She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character. As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means.

Ok, dude. He continues:

Because Robbie is new on the scene, reporters are trying to fix her with a narrative. The job of the celebrity journalist: peg ’em so it’s not only as if you know ’em but always have known ’em or someone just like ’em. But Robbie is too fresh to be pegged. Less being than becoming. The most recent theory has her as a celebrity uncomfortable with fame. A case of buyer’s remorse.

Once again, instead of focusing on a promising young actresses talent, she is reduced to her sex appeal. As can be expected, Twitter had a whole host of opinions regarding this uncomfortable piece, from the description of Robbie as “a second-semester freshman” to the simplistic explanation of Australia.

As somebody pointed out, a similar article was written about Alicia Silverstone pre Twitter. I assume there was no outrage then, so what has changed? Perhaps this this new found cultural anger is a step in the right direction, or maybe people just like to use Twitter to be angry. I am hopeful.

I agree it’s gross, but I assumed this style of douchey faux-poetic writing was common in certain magazines…mens’ and womens’ magazines.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Skarsgard parody was real, for that matter.

Why do we have Uproxx articles with a bunch of unknown peoples twitter reactions? Does Uproxx have any writers that can put an article together with a coherent review of the article with out adding what Jenny from Nebraska said on Twitter? I mean, I know you do, so you should employ their talent.

Second of all, having watched a couple of movies that she’s been in…Margot Robbie seems to be treated like a piece of meat in her film roles. Her appearance in the Big Short was especially egregious. Now, does that make it okay for the writer to creep so hard? Not at all. But I wonder, is the reaction less or more than it would’ve been had Margot been somebody like Emma Watson, who is less sexualized on film.

Do we get used to an actress getting treated like a living statue and then don’t mind as much when they get written about as one? Or has her dignity been attacked already as an actor, so when they reduce her personhood down to being an object of masturbatory fantasy we freak out.